


gold and green and silver-bright

by Hoothootmotherf_ckers



Series: annual fall fluff fics [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (technically) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Camping, Fluff, Gen, Team as Family, Thanksgiving, and fun fall adventures, this is genuinely all fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:46:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27688477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoothootmotherf_ckers/pseuds/Hoothootmotherf_ckers
Summary: Barry, Lup, Angus, and the rest of the family embark on an annual fall tradition: camping. It's exactly as chaotic and heartfelt as you would expect.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans & Lup & Angus McDonald, Barry Bluejeans & Magnus Burnsides & Davenport & Merle Highchurch & Lucretia & Lup & Taako, Barry Bluejeans/Lup, Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: annual fall fluff fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1963060
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16





	gold and green and silver-bright

It’s early morning, dawn just creeping over the hills, and Barry and Lup are already moving. There’s no time to waste and so sleeping bags, tents, clothes, and all other essentials are packed into their beat-up hatchback with a kind of chaotic efficiency. 

Last to be bundled into the car is one Angus McDonald, still in his pajamas. As soon as he’s buckled in, the ten year old falls back asleep, hair flopping into his face. Lup and Barry exchange a glance, grinning. 

“Should we…” Barry whispers, gesturing vaguely toward the boy.

Lup giggles. “Nah, let him sleep. He’ll need the energy.”

And with that, she hops into the driver’s seat and they’re off. 

They drive for hours, daylight warming the sky as suburbs make way to highway and houses are replaced by rolling hills of golden grasses, dotted with dark green oaks, the soil turning from a muted brown to a rich red-orange. Once Angus is properly awake, they turn up the radio, singing along to their favorites and dancing as much as seatbelts (and having to drive a vehicle) will allow. 

The hours pass quickly and soon enough, they’ve arrived at the campground. There’s plenty of campsites left, but they’re not here just for any random site - no, the reason for their early start was to claim _their_ campsites. Every year, without fail, they come back to the same ones, and they refuse to let that streak break. So as soon as they arrive, as soon as they pull into the campsite, Angus bursts out the door, tarp in his arms. He races to the center of the campsite, unfurls the tarp with a massive wave of his entire body, and then proceeds to fall face-first onto it. 

“WE GOT IT!” Angus yells, slightly muffled by his face full of tarp. Lup, laughing, quietly ushers off Barry to go properly register and pay for the campsites. 

She starts unloading the car, basking in the sunlight falling through the trees. These are their campsites for a _reason_ \- along the edge of the campground, the perfect mixture of shade and sunlight, enough space for all of them, and most importantly a small, easily jumpable creek along one edge all that separates them from the park proper. 

As the afternoon passes, the others arrive. Merle is next, bringing Mavis and Mookie in his alarmingly old-looking Prius. While he starts setting up his tent and hammock, the kids rush off toward Angus. Moments later, they’re across the creek and into the park, kicking around a soccer ball with the wild energy unique to kids who have been stuck in a car too long. Davenport is next, rolling up on a motorcycle with his camping gear strapped into panniers. He sets up his tent in minutes, and Barry and Lup leave him to hold down the proverbial fort while they go check on the kids. Moments later, they’ve been roped into being opposing goalies, although technically it’s more of a Lup versus Barry versus all the kids situation - this is really at this point a game only tangentially related to soccer.

They’re alerted to the arrival of Magnus and Lucretia by the rhythm of chopping wood. Even though he can’t have been here for more than twenty minutes, Magnus has already amassed a stack of firewood almost as high as he is tall. On top of the pile sits Lucretia, reading a book and presiding over all the affairs. She gives a bright smile and a wave to the kids, who immediately start clamoring over who can climb up and get to her faster. 

Finally, as the now mud-covered kids return to the campsite, the last arrivals… arrive. Taako and Kravitz roll up in their van, immediately pulling out a mountain of coolers and at least six different camp stoves.

“Alright, everyone!” Taako shouts, “Let’s get this shit going!”

“We’ve been here for hours already,“ Magnus points out, “Like, you’re a bit late to the party, dude.”

Lup just gives her brother the middle finger. 

Taako brushes them both off. “Nope, can’t be a party until there’s me, and also food, so the party is just beginning and it needs like a shit-ton of sous chefs so let’s do this thing!”

Taako seizes three picnic tables and most of the campers to set up a monumental assembly line of chili production. Vegetables are chopped, cans are opened and drained, and things are stirring in no time at all. Taako flutters around the table, interfering with everyone’s business except Lup, who has commandeered one of the stoves and jokingly threatens Taako with a knife when he comes too close. Speaking of knives, Kravitz is working overtime keeping them out of the hands of all three children and also Merle. 

(“Aw, c’mon, Krav!”

“Merle. Merle fucking Highchurch. ‘It’s fine, my arm’s plastic, I can’t do too much damage to myself’ is not, in fact, a glowing endorsement of knife safety skills!”

“…I was also a Boy Scout?”

“ _Also_ not a point in your favor!”) 

Somehow, half an hour later finds all campers seated around a campfire eating seven distinct varieties of chili. They dig in, as the November air has rapidly dropped from cool to cold, with a brisk breeze bringing shivers all around. Magnus starts a fire, and as it sparks and crackles into life he sends the kids on a mission for the _perfect_ marshmallow roasting sticks.

They come back five minutes later and are met with a blank stare from Magnus. “Mookie, kiddo, not sure what your plan was here, because not only is that less a stick and more of a vine, but that’s also poison oak.”

Mookie is quickly bustled off to be washed along with the dishes, and Taako breaks out his s’more makings. They roast marshmallows and drink hot cocoa and huddle around the fire, heatedly debating the proper color of a perfectly toasted marshmallow. Davenport waxes poetic on the method of slowly turning a marshmallow over the coals to create a uniform, beautiful golden brown color. Lup intentionally burns hers, eats just the burned outside, and repeats the process - this earns her scandalized looks and grudging respect. 

Eventually, once they’ve eaten all the s’mores they can and the children are messes of sticky marshmallow, they call it a night, retreating to their tents and the warmth they hold.

The sun rises much too early the following morning, although that’s not what wakes up Lup and Barry. No, that’s a distant trilling, warbling sound, followed by Angus jumping straight up in his sleeping bag and whisper-yelling “TURKEYS!” 

Resigned to being awake, they extract Angus from his now quite tangled sleeping bag and bundle into warm clothes. As they exit their tent, they discover everyone else has done the same, with a universal trend of tired-eyed adults and vibrating with excitement children. As a unit, they hop the creek and head into the park.

Their feet crunch on the frost-covered grass as they walk, ice-edged oak leaves catching the sunlight and flaring with a prism of color. The sky is a muted grey-blue, the day a sharp silvery-gold. The still, quiet air is broken only by the occasional hiss of breath or rubbing together of hands, and then by the distant, growing nearer sounds of a flock of wild turkeys. 

As they turn a corner around one more copse of trees, they finally spot them on a distant hill. They peck at the ground, wandering in scattered paths around the bases of trees, searching for acorns and grubs. All of the campers stare, enraptured, for a few moments, until a quiet, whispering fight breaks out. The turkey-watching is adjourned, half because they’re starting to get cold and hungry and half because they were rapidly approaching the intersection of a defensive group of fairly large wild animals and a Magnus and Mookie dead-set on petting them. 

They make their way back to the campsite and start up the campfire again, both for the needed warmth and an annual tradition: breakfast s’mores. Overall, breakfast is a quiet, efficient affair - how to eat as much food and drink as much cocoa and coffee as possible to stay warm and energized in weather where breath billows like clouds of sparkling smoke. 

As soon as everyone is properly fueled for the road, and trail rations have been appropriately divvied up, they set out on a hike. The kids, of course, run ahead, exclaiming over each patch of moss and fungus as if it’s the first one they’ve ever seen. At least Mavis or Angus is always within arms’ reach of Mookie and can stop him from eating anything he shouldn’t. The adults trail behind, chatting and catching up on their lives, and drinking in the smell of the trees and the color of the sky. 

They make their way back to the park just before lunch, and so have time to explore the museum and historic sites. The park is more than just a field and a picnic ground - it has history reaching back many hundreds of years, evidence of that scattered around the park and surrounding areas. Mavis and Angus wander, entranced, and the adults skim over the information they’ve read many years in a row and just enjoy being back. Mookie is bored until he’s pointed toward the interactive exhibits, at which point he has to be physically carried away for lunch. 

After a lunch of sandwiches and other quick, portable food, they bundle into their cars to further explore. The area near the park is scattered with historic small towns, remnants of industry two hundred years old, and now home to quaint old thrift stores and coffeeshops. They lose Lucretia for almost three hours in an old bookstore - when they finally find her again, she’s nearly hidden under piles of books and two bookstore cats. Taako and Lup are distracted by a cooking store with gleaming copper pots, while half the party again breaks off as they pass a candy shop. 

As the daylight fades and the stores begin to close, they make their way back to their beloved campground. Tonight’s dinner is as intense an affair as the last - it has to be, when you’re cooking camping food for eleven! This time, when they finish dinner, they go back out to the meadow rather than stay huddled around the fire. Once there, they stare up at the sky, and the brilliant scattering of stars, so many more than they’re used to. Barry points out constellations - the Big Dipper, Ursa Minor, Orion, and many others. He tells the stories, as well as information about the stars themselves - the binary system in the Big Dipper, how to find and navigate by Polaris, the North Star. They stand out there, staring at the sky and the occasional shooting star, until the air grows too cold and the adults, as well as children, begin to yawn.

Eventually, goodnights are said and small clusters, pieces of the larger family, break off to their respective tents. Lup, Barry, and Angus head off to theirs, watching the bob of flashlights as their family softly scatters around them. They burrow into their sleeping bags, lights flickering out in favor of the deep, comforting darkness around them.

Voice heavy with exhaustion, Angus murmurs into the dark, “We’re doing this again next year, right?”

Lup reaches out to ruffle his hair. “Of course, kiddo. It’s tradition.”

And with that reassurance, they sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was going to be a Thanksgiving fic, and to a certain degree, it still is. Everything that they do in this fic is part of my family’s Thanksgiving traditions - we really did go camping for Thanksgiving! This is set in the exact place we go, enormous bonus points to anyone who can figure out even the general area. Breakfast s’mores are also a Friday morning tradition that I stand by. But, well. It’s 2020. Thanksgiving is a rough topic for me at the moment. Not only is it covid times so I won’t be going home, but I’m also living on my own for the first time, and there’s other family stuff going on that makes this _very_ hard. Genuinely tearing up writing this right now. But at the same time, I love Thanksgiving, and I love the things I do for Thanksgiving. I really wanted to write this fic, but I couldn’t get past the emotional rollercoaster of actually writing Thanksgiving dinner happening, so instead I went for a walk and came up with this. 
> 
> (also, our post Thanksgiving dinner traditions involve going to a cemetery at night which is uh a _wild_ thing to insert into a fic meant to be fluffy.)
> 
> Anyway, I do genuinely want to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. It's going to be different, that's for sure, but we can still make this work. And stay safe out there, everyone. <3


End file.
